A font is a set of displayable images known as “glyphs,” each of which depicts a letter, character or symbol. Each glyph can be thought of as the computer-age equivalent of a block of type used in a printing press. Developing a font is a skilled, labor intensive task. Typographers spend many hours crafting each glyph in a font, and consider not only the shape of the glyph itself, but also how the glyph will look in any likely combination with other glyphs. Because developing a font for a single language is challenging, device manufacturers may only develop particular fonts that a specific device may support. Such device fonts are traditionally stored in the device driver for the device. Unfortunately, there are several problems with this approach for creating and deploying device fonts.
Because device-resident font metrics may be stored in device drivers, editing documents that may use a device-resident font becomes dependent on device driver installation. Existing support for device fonts in current operating systems is limited to allowing an application to enumerate and format documents for installed and connected devices. As a result, a document employing device-resident fonts cannot be freely distributed. No mechanism yet exists, for example, for identifying how to represent a given printer device font on a display screen, or for ensuring that a document remains usable when viewed or edited on a system which does not have the target device installed and connected. Applications are left to implement these features by themselves.
What is needed is a way for a computer system to use a device-dependent font in a graphical display without having to load the device driver so that a user may display and/or edit a document formatted using the device-dependent font. Such a system and method should provide predictability of the screen fonts a user will see when a user chooses a particular printer font for display of text.